Sony’s Hirai: we’re over 10 years away from disc-less PlayStation

An all-digital future may be inevitable for gaming consoles, but Sony's Kaz …

How close are we to an all-digital gaming future? According to Sony's Kaz Hirai, a long way off. "To think everything will be downloaded in two years, three years or even ten years from now is taking it a little bit to the extreme," he told MCV.

"We do business in parts of the world where network infrastructure isn’t as robust as one would hope," he said. "There's always going to be requirement for a business of our size and scope to have a physical medium."

While some gamers like digital distribution more than others, it's coming. Publishers like it for the lack of resellable product, consumers enjoy the convenience, and GameStop is terrified of it. While Hirai is right in that many markets simply don't have the infrastructure to support digital-only products, that won't keep Sony or Microsoft from moving aggressively into the digital space in the coming years by offering more games for download as well as a physical product.

Disc drives in the next generation of consoles? Count on it. But we can also be sure to see a strong push into the digital space at the same time. Sony was also the first company to attempt an all-digital console with the PSP Go, which seems to have already died an ugly death.

The disc could eventually be simply a way to "download" the digital product through physical media. The game would be copied to the hard drive no matter how it was downloaded. A disc with an activation code can be thought of as a single use disc or as a disc that can be used as many times as you want provided you buy enough activation codes.

Unless they start dropping prices from the absurd 60-70 Euro price points, I'm not going to buy them over digital distribution anytime soon. The only games I buy nowadays are used and cost half or less of the retail cost. And the only digital games I buy are the ones on sale (2 Euros for Plain Sight? Yes, please). Maybe also the occasional indie game for 20 Euros which hold my interest longer than most retail games. Maybe I'm a cheap bastard, but I don't consider any of retail games to be worth 60-70 Euros. The last two I bought were Starcraft 2 and Heavy Rain ... the next one will be Gran Turismo 5. A total of three full price games this year. Publishers hate people like me and yet I couldn't care less. It's all about getting the most out of my money, I don't have infinite funds for gaming (especially as a student).

A couple years ago I would have gone along with the next generation being download-only. However, ISPs like Comcast and AT&T have stepped in to stifle the market and hold back innovation. Their bandwidth caps, reluctance to upgrade their networks, and false claims of speed and reliability have effectively torpedoed serious reliance on a digital download system for consoles. I'm not so sure we'll ever see this happen for every title now that ISPs are focusing on "managed services" rather than being the big, fat, dumb internet pipe they should be.

Unless they start dropping prices from the absurd 60-70 Euro price points, I'm not going to buy them over digital distribution anytime soon.

That's the point publishers and developers cannot ask 60-70Euro for a piece of entertainment that often lasts only 5-10 hours and then whine because people are selling them and/or buy them used. They cannot have their cake and eat it.

I suppose. But both the Xbox and PS3 drives are 2.5" form factor. And for a console, $100 is way too much to spend on storage. If you're a would-be console maker, you want to spend most of your money on CPU, video hardware, and memory. Storage will get cheaper over time - but you won't be able to change those other things until the next platform revision.

500 GB of 2.5" storage is around $60 these days. I think that's still too much to spend on storage if you're a console. You want to spend around $30.

As far as the PSP Go, I would have bought one if I didn't already have a PSP 2000. I pretty much stick to downloaded games exclusively anyway, since the battery life is so much better.

I had a choice between the PSP Go and the PSP3001. I picked the latter because not every game I wanted was available for download and the D-Pad is actually worse on the PSP Go. (I only own one game that relies on the analog nub.)

Bull. We now have USB drives that are well more than big enough (and will be cheap enough in only 3 years) to put a Blu-Ray sized, HD game on!It's time to go totally discless, the only reason these bastards don't want to go that route is because they want people to have to buy another disc when their first INEVITABLY gets scratched past the point it can be read.

jdietz wrote:

I suppose. But both the Xbox and PS3 drives are 2.5" form factor. And for a console, $100 is way too much to spend on storage. If you're a would-be console maker, you want to spend most of your money on CPU, video hardware, and memory. Storage will get cheaper over time - but you won't be able to change those other things until the next platform revision.

500 GB of 2.5" storage is around $60 these days. I think that's still too much to spend on storage if you're a console. You want to spend around $30.

No, it isn't 'too much to spend on storage' in the slightest. You are also overlooking large USB drives, which could do the job that discs do today. Look above for the REAL reason why they won't switch from easily scratched discs.

The business model needs to be examined closely. Sony fell flat on their face with the media-less PSPGo and if full sized games continue to balloon in size then ISP download caps is certainly going to be a problem. Another thing to consider is the intangible benefit of the used game market. I’m not as likely to invest in a console without a source of economical quality games. The used game market feeds that need and stokes my enthusiasm to play. My collection is by no means entirely second-hand, but preowned software does pay an important role in filling it out. If I were forced to part with sixty dollars for every title or wait weeks or months for discounts on older titles my collection would be spartan and I would be forced to question the overall value of my hobby. I’m sure there are many others who feel the same way. If the console developers cannot find a way to replace that used game market once they move to a pure digital distribution model then I think I’d probably forgo purchasing a console and stick with Valve’s Steam service.

The argument about network quality makes sense. Imagine trying to download Metal Gear Solid 4 at 50 GB with the average cable connection in the US. That's bad enough. Now, I just came back from Bali where there were ps3 for rent. I could barely upload a single photo anywhere in that country, let alone download a modern game.

It depends on how the media is delivered and what I can do with it once I purchase it.

I'll take a game to a friends house to play. If there is no mechanism for doing that with a digital download, then it's a no-go.

I don't want to rely on the service providers servers to always be around for me to re-download my content. I need a way to back up that content on another form of media so that I never lose the ability to play the game as long as I have a device capable of running the code.

When using hard-wired network connects, I can get around 22-30Mbps downloads at my house. I hardly ever actually see this when I'm downloading so let's just put it at 10Mbps. It usually takes 1 hour for me to download a file that is 1-1.5 GB in size. A Typical game is 9GB while some "larger" games can fill 25GB. Let's just say I'm download Burnout Paradise (which on PS3 is a 4GB download). This will take me about 4 hours or more before I can install and play (plus updates). As time goes on games will use more storage. Until these downloads take 5 minutes or less for the largest games, I'm not going to be fully on-board with all-digital.

My examples may be a little flaky, but I'm not trying to write up a debate paper here. I'm just not ready for all digital. I've got some downloadable games and Burnout Paradise is the only full retail digital download I've gone for. I also don't think that the United States networks are ready either. There's too much internet politics and data capping going on right now and the super-fast broadband (150Mbps+) are just barely starting to pop up.

The most interesting to watch at the moment is going to be services like OnLive. I don't like their model per se, but they are trying to set a precedent that is very attractive to Publishers.

It will be a while before all digital is fully realized and accepted for American gaming culture.

I picked up a PSP Go, and for the form factor, it's a nice little gaming device and I still use it regularly. It's funny, though. My main source of games are the older Playstation 1 titles.

Same. My PSP 3000 is full of my favorite PS1 games. 6-10 bucks per game isn't too much to ask for being able to carry them with me anywhere. The exception is LittleBigPlanet which is still fun without the multiplayer option.

There's always going to be a physical, boxed product to sell because a piece of paper or a gift card wrapped and placed under the Christmas tree just isn't the same. Digital distribution will grow, sure, but it'll require quite a few generational shifts before the market for digital downloads is a superset of the market for discs.

I wouldn't like it because I want the ability to resell and buy used. Consoles I will not touch used. Games though, most of my collection was bought used.

kjak wrote:

It depends on how the media is delivered and what I can do with it once I purchase it.

I'll take a game to a friends house to play. If there is no mechanism for doing that with a digital download, then it's a no-go.

I don't want to rely on the service providers servers to always be around for me to re-download my content. I need a way to back up that content on another form of media so that I never lose the ability to play the game as long as I have a device capable of running the code.

There is a mechanism for that (at least on the XBox 360). You just pop off the hard drive and bring it to your friend's house, and swap it in. If you don't want to do that, you can store the game on a memory stick along with your XBox Live profile, plug it into your friend's XBox, log in and play. If you are willing to download the game on their system, even if they didn't buy it but only downloaded the trial version, just bring your XBox Live profile over on a memory stick, log in, and launch the game and you have a fully unlocked version. If you have your saved games on the same memory stick, you're good to go. Once you log off, it's the locked trial version, again.

Of course if you aren't willing to carry anything with you, you can just recover your profile on their XBox, download the game, log in, and play. Of course you won't have any saved games, though, and you'll have to recover your profile on your own system again.

My friends and I all have XBox 360s, and we have all done each of these methods. It works flawlessly and intuitively.

It's likely that the next generation consoles (8th generation?) will probably hit sometime around 2013-2015 and will probably all have multiple SKUs, one of each will be a discless system. So you'd have a version of the PS4 with a Blu-Ray drive and a medium sized harddrive, and one with no Blu-Ray and a larger harddrive. I'm guessing that by the time these systems come out, very large flash based SSDs will be pretty cheap and you'll find that they'll all have at least 128 gig SSDs.

I <3 my PSPGo as much as people hate it. I find it really convenient to have my game collection in one nice neat package rather then the need to keep discs with me all the time. Plus some of the older games on PSN are pretty cheap.

It depends on how the media is delivered and what I can do with it once I purchase it.

I'll take a game to a friends house to play. If there is no mechanism for doing that with a digital download, then it's a no-go.

Exactly, digital distribution is not a good thing for the end user. You won't be able to easily purchase used games nor would you easier be able to lend games to friends or to rent games.

Add-in the rather likely probability that the games won't be any cheaper for the consumer, it's a win-win scenario for the console manufacturer and game publisher (fewer manufacturering/packaging costs, limited/controlled/no used sales or rents), but a not-so-hot scenario for the gamer.

I was attempting to read this article when some "opinion central" popup ad floated across my screen and hovered over the text, making reading impossible without clicking the annoying ad's little "x" button. adblock is going back on, sorry ars.

There’s just no way I’m going download-only in the foreseeable future.

*There’s no guarantee that the servers used to back up/store games you’ve purchased will continue to run for as long as you would like to keep your library

*There’s no resell value, so there’s less incentive to lower prices as titles age

*Say goodbye to hacking your system to get it to do what you want (not that we’re seeing this kind of activity like with the original Xbox); hacked system means you can’t get online, not getting online means no downloads, no downloads means no games

*ISPs. Long story short: we already do too much with the bandwidth available to us to think about the ‘convenience’ of downloading a game. These file sizes are typically larger than any of the media that we stream, download, or upload (legal; I edit others’ videos to a site for them to review—so pipe down with that pirate parroting ), and I wouldn’t want to ration out the download time.

*Can’t lend/borrow—though they may get smart about this and try something along the lines of certain digital book formats..

I was attempting to read this article when some "opinion central" popup ad floated across my screen and hovered over the text, making reading impossible without clicking the annoying ad's little "x" button. adblock is going back on, sorry ars.

The argument about network quality makes sense. Imagine trying to download Metal Gear Solid 4 at 50 GB with the average cable connection in the US. That's bad enough. Now, I just came back from Bali where there were ps3 for rent. I could barely upload a single photo anywhere in that country, let alone download a modern game.

Bali is just a province in Indonesia. So your claim of "anywhere in that country" is inaccurate.

Internet connection in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, is very good (but stay away from the ADSL run by the country's telco monopoly). I can't vouch for Internet connection in Bali. Most likely bad, as most ISPs concentrate on only the big three cities of Indonesia: Jakarta, Surabaya, and Medan.

I was attempting to read this article when some "opinion central" popup ad floated across my screen and hovered over the text, making reading impossible without clicking the annoying ad's little "x" button. adblock is going back on, sorry ars.

Hey there, it's some sort of mistake by the CondeNast ad ops people, we've been working on getting it off the site since yesterday and its been a huge pain, here's the ongoing discussion thread about it:

Why is the word "digital" used to mean "downloaded" in this article? This usage seems to be increasing in the general media, and I've even seen it at Ars Technica before today. Shouldn't Ars Technica use technical terms correctly?

It depends on how the media is delivered and what I can do with it once I purchase it.

I'll take a game to a friends house to play. If there is no mechanism for doing that with a digital download, then it's a no-go.

Exactly, digital distribution is not a good thing for the end user. You won't be able to easily purchase used games nor would you easier be able to lend games to friends or to rent games.

Add-in the rather likely probability that the games won't be any cheaper for the consumer, it's a win-win scenario for the console manufacturer and game publisher (fewer manufacturering/packaging costs, limited/controlled/no used sales or rents), but a not-so-hot scenario for the gamer.

While you're not going to be seeing any price drops because of digital distribution, you're almost certainly going to be saved several normal price increases. Digital distribution not only cuts out costs to the publisher, but they also cut out the middleman. All the profit Walmart was making, plus the cost of shipping them a box, plus the cost for Walmart to carry inventory, plus the cost for sales/inventory/management staff relating to selling games are all cut. Blizzard selling SC2 through Walmart nets them something around $20-$30 a copy, but sold through Battle.net they get $60. As profit margins increase, the companies aren't just going to ferret that away into their pockets. More money will be reinvested in additional games, or used to undercut competitors, or used to adjust profit maximization techniques. All of these things are a benefit to consumers.

Sure there are costs, but claiming that gamers aren't going to see any benefit from this is severely ignorant.

Absolutely zero chance of me supporting a digital only download for games. I already don't purchase the ones available from the store from multiple reasons others have already mentioned. And a Sony digital only platform? I'd rather be eaten alive.

I have thousands of games I've never even touched waiting to be played through emulators. All digital or a requirement to have an always on internet connection to play games (unless its multiplayer of course) is when I drop out of the games market for good.

Why is the word "digital" used to mean "downloaded" in this article? This usage seems to be increasing in the general media, and I've even seen it at Ars Technica before today. Shouldn't Ars Technica use technical terms correctly?

Good. I am kinda fed up with the way they make money off of people and take it from developers by being the "resale" point; they take a game and give you 1/10th of its actual value as "credit" (which costs them absolutely nothing) toward buying something else that you just end up taking back. It's a killer deal, because with how most games only go for $10 (then get resold at $40+) and are less than 20 hours of play, they get plenty of business every day.

They'll have to figure out a way to profit off of the new system before it comes along... or if they were like Sony/Apple, find a way to legally threaten people into keeping the dated system just so they can keep milking it.